SCIENCE FICTION
597
subject to several very broad restrictions. Here we can project our
dreams.
This aspect of SF links up with a very respectable tradition. Dante,
when he locates his inferno inside the globe, his purgatory at the anti–
podes and his paradise in the stars, is merely projecting his theology,
and a good deal more, into the empty spaces which medieval cosmology
reserved.
Thus Verne scrupulously inventoried the lacunae of the geography
of his age and filled them with myths inscribed within the extension of
the known facts, achieving a synthesis which strikes us as naive but
which by its breadth and harmony outstrips anything his successors have
attempted.
When an author of the eighteenth century wanted to give his story
some appeara nce of reality, he had' a ready-made site in which to locate
it : the islands of the Pacific.
(Cf.
Diderot:
Supplement to Bougainville's
Voyage .)
Today, when the exploration of the earth's surface is quite
advanced, we prefer to locate our islands in the sky. But if we once knew
nothing, of course, of the archipelagos which had not yet been discovered,
we were at least quite sure that apart from certain remarkable peculi–
arities they could not be very different from those we knew already. We
were still on the same Earth, with the same general conditions.
On the contrary, the little we know today about the islands in the
sky proves to us that everything must be very different there. We know
that gravity is more powerful on Venus, less powerful on Mars, than on
Earth, etc. These several elements oblige the writer who respects them
to make an enormous effort of imagination, force him to invent something
truly new. Unfortunately, the creation of another "nature," even when
based on elementary information, is a task so arduous that no author,
so far, has undertaken it methodically.
In order not to acknowledge ourselves vanquished, we raise our
sights: instead of describing what might happen on Mars and Venus,
we leap a t once to the third planet of the
Epsilon
system of the Swan, or
else, since in fact there is nothing to stop us once we have started on this
path, planet
n
of star
n
in galaxy
n.
At first the reader is impressed by
these cascades of light years ; the solar system was certainly a wretched
little village, here we are launched into the universe
at large.
But he
soon realizes that these ultra-remote planets resemble the earth much
more than they do its neighbors. Out of the immense number of stars
which populate space, it is always permissible to imagine one on which
the conditions of life are very close to those we know. The authors have
rediscovered the islands of the eighteenth century. They employ a vaguely
